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[Grendus]

Worst game I've ever played into any amount was probably World of Warcraft.

A lot depends on which expansion you joined during. Vanilla was very grindy, and very hard in high end because PvP required raid gear and raiding required 39 other people, with the right class composition, with as pitiful a social life as you had. TBC was pretty good, PvP was painfully unbalanced but didn't require PvE to be done, and PvE had some more options for the less hardcore - heroics, 10 mans, etc. WotLK got so dumbed down I quit, even after my very casual raiding guild downed most of the content they kept nerfing it. It was actually kind of pathetic, people still whined that Archivon and the other guy were too hard, after I saw people downing it with an average of 100 dps and one healer.

Another one would be Flick Defense for Android. You get five levels in the demo. That's about enough time to buy one power up and barely learn how to shoot before it's game over. Meanwhile I've seen free flash games that handled the concept of defending a castle better. FFS.

[nenjin]

I remember playing EverQuest...  And when the sun went down, you couldn't see anything.  Carrying a torch took up a slot.  Made elves (with infra/ultra-vision) downright advantageous.  Light spells, or items that had a light effect, were incredibly handy.  At night there was a genuine concern that you'd stumble into something you didn't want to be fighting.  And if you had set up camp, it was the elf or the guy with the best lighting equipment who wound up pulling...  While the rest of you huddled together and hoped you didn't lose sight of each-other.  Fun stuff.

Everquest is THE game I refer to, to make the point about why real darkness is a good thing for immersive game play.

So many hours of my best memories of that game involve dealing with challenges provided by the natural world. Dealing with darkness meant you had to go slow to avoid running INTO A FUCKING BEAR. You had to back track, remember land marks (in the age before real-time map overlays), and you lived in terror as you sat to regain HP or meditate.

Visual darkness as a game play element, for me, encompasses a lot of what's lacking with today's RPGs. It's a detail that's wholly immersive, yet can be obnoxious, and so has been discarded by developers, in favor of things that make the game easier and require less work on the player's part. (Maps, "importance" halos, and fewer challenges between Points A and B.) There's a good reason for doing those things too, you don't want the player to be frustrated or have to read a guide to do something...but the scales have tipped too far in the other direction. (It shows what the Witcher devs were thinking though when they made all that player assist stuff OPTIONAL.)

That's why I still view EQ as "an experience" rather than just as a game. (An at times tedious, agonizing experience.) I've never really had the sense of journeying across a world, complete with all the challenges, mystery and threats a world should provide, since playing EQ. I remember running around with a party at night in an unfamiliar area, and being physically terrified of losing sight of another member of the party.

I credit most if not all of that to EQ's death mechanic, but that's a story for another day.

And on the Witcher, I have to say....

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

God bless them for what they tried to do with the Vizima Confidential quest line, and the whole conspiracy thing....but what a train wreck, in the end, from both a writing standpoint and a mechanics standpoint. I was so fucking confused throughout, and I finally proved people's innocence by....taking the alternate dialog paths that I had originally avoided so as not to piss them off and have them just stop talking to me. "Azar Javed wanted me to think you were part of the conspiracy...." Really? Because it came across more as one totally over the top Xanatos' Roulette. The meta plot of the Outskirts of Vizima was the exact same story. Everyone turns out to be a conspirator and/or a bad guy despite how totally out of character it seems for them. I wonder if it's just the translation...or if they really thought it was a well delivered twist. Because every twist so far, except maybe Raymond/Azar Javed, has left me going "Uh.....ok. I guess. Whatever."

I think the guys who wrote the Witcher's quest plots had a seriously abusive GM in their past, who constantly added NPC party members to the group, only to have them try to stab everyone in their sleep.

[Medicine Man]

Grand Theft Auto IV (4):It was a bit fun at times but you know what?the only thing it added was graphics,it removed too many good things that the other games had and it is OVERATED.

[fenrif]

Grand Theft Auto IV (4):It was a bit fun at times but you know what?the only thing it added was graphics,it removed too many good things that the other games had and it is OVERATED.

I couldn't agree more. GTA4 is the worst in the series in my opinion. Took out all the fun stuff and added the whiney NPC doucer-y of dead rising's Otis. Also Ricky Gervais was involved, which is a minus point for anything.

Worst game I've played in a long time: Kane and Lynch 2. It's a 4 hours long extremely generic 3rd person cover shooter. Only the baddies all take about 20 bullets to kill. None of the guns are even remotely accurate, there is literally no ending... Theres no real plot anyway, but the game just randomly rolls credits at a seemingly arbitrary point.

[nenjin]

Worst game I've played in a long time: Kane and Lynch 2. It's a 4 hours long extremely generic 3rd person cover shooter. Only the baddies all take about 20 bullets to kill. None of the guns are even remotely accurate, there is literally no ending... Theres no real plot anyway, but the game just randomly rolls credits at a seemingly arbitrary point.

That sounds pretty much like K&L1, so at least it's faithful!

Seriously, after how much bad press Kane and Lynch got, you figure they would have tried harder this time. I mean, that's the only conceivable reason they greenlighted K&L2, right?

[Josephus]

Grand Theft Auto IV (4):It was a bit fun at times but you know what?the only thing it added was graphics,it removed too many good things that the other games had and it is OVERATED.

I couldn't agree more. GTA4 is the worst in the series in my opinion. Took out all the fun stuff and added the whiney NPC doucer-y of dead rising's Otis. Also Ricky Gervais was involved, which is a minus point for anything.

Yeah, San Andreas was much better in terms of sheer content. It's my personal favorite.

[fenrif]

Worst game I've played in a long time: Kane and Lynch 2. It's a 4 hours long extremely generic 3rd person cover shooter. Only the baddies all take about 20 bullets to kill. None of the guns are even remotely accurate, there is literally no ending... Theres no real plot anyway, but the game just randomly rolls credits at a seemingly arbitrary point.

That sounds pretty much like K&L1, so at least it's faithful!

Seriously, after how much bad press Kane and Lynch got, you figure they would have tried harder this time. I mean, that's the only conceivable reason they greenlighted K&L2, right?

Kane and lynch 1 at least had some redeemable qualities. It was a pretty decent 2 person coop game, with some good points. Robbing a bank while lynch starts hallucinating (with whoever is playing him seeing the hallucinated police shooting at them) was great.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I quite enjoyed the first Kane and Lynch, myself. I don't think I've seen a video game story that dark ever before. Still haven't played the second one, and my money is too limited for that to happen anytime soon.

[Grakelin]

Ricky Gervais was involved, which is a minus point for anything.

what

[ein]

Ricky Gervais was involved, which is a minus point for anything.

what

[Satarus]

Okay I see people complaing about Fallout 3 and Oblivion.  They aren't bad games.  Maybe not your cup of tea.  I can respect that but the mechanics aren't that awful. 

Now lets talk about some truly terrible games.  Where's Waldo for the NES.  I had the misfortune of owning it.  The game was near impossible and had an annoying repetitive BG music.  Also I did end up beating it on Normal difficulty.  Perhaps a testament to my own sadomasochism.

Next up, Final Fantasy 13.  I'd heard some good things about it, but I now want to know what those good things are.  I'm on the 2nd of 3 discs and I'm still in a tutorial.  A boring and super linear tutorial.  You walk down a single hallway and fight the monsters that are in front of you.  There is literally nothing else too it.  That is not good game design there, that is in fact, bad game design.  The tutorial should be an hour tops.  Plus the inventory is a joke.  Not being able to control any other party members is like a giant step backwards. 

Another one, Lords of the Realm 1.  The game has a terrible user interface.  There is no tutorial or into missions so the learning curve is just a brick wall.  Makes me wonder how they got Lords of the Realm 2 if the first one was so abysmally bad.  Not that I'm complaining because Lords of the Realm 2 was a really fun game. Although once you learned the power of the pikeman and how to exploit your archers it's pretty trivial.

[Puck]

To be completely honest, I thought World of Warcraft was actually one of the worst games I ever played, and I played some utter bullshit in my time

Seein how many customers they have it's quite hard to say that without angering at least somebody...

I love a bit of grind, I love a bit of repetitive, I love (some) mmos, but WoW was just pushing it. I mean, I really liked the friggin style, the "artwork" is really cool, if you ask me. I saw that game, heard how everybody loved it, dove into it, and just HAD to stop, because it made me mighty sick beyond description.

I dont know, was there ever an MMO with this mindless style of repetitive quests? I tried SWG in its early stages, I tried AO, both had some pretty mindnumbing activities, but WoW just won the flowerpot. After I saw how this game took off, I was pretty fookin scared of my fellow gamers. (edit: on the contrary I really loved Ultima Online because it gave you the opportunity to actually do stuff "outside the box" and just generally enjoy yourself, doing whatever tickles your fancy. I think it was the only mumorpuger in which I actually roleplayed. In WoW even fishing gives you that Treadmill feeling that doesnt go away.)

High level, and "complex" teamwork requiring content may be funnish, but there are myriads of games which do this better, imho.

At any rate, it's not actually the worst, but for me the discrepancy between how much people like it and how much I think it should be liked is definetly the greatest when it comes to WoW.

That and combustion engines, but that is a different story.

Oh and fighting games! They are all bad beyond description, if you ask me. Because they just make no fucking sense! I heard there is some samurai game which is pretty accurate, I like toribash on the "proper" settings, and I like Street Fighter for its fun arcadey style as well as Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 because they pulled off that hype so nicely when I was exactly at that certain age (14)... but generally I think fighting games are actually bad.

Toribash being the exception, because it does nothing of the things I hate in your average fighting game.

And I'm not talking about sidescrolling arcadey beatemups like Double Dragon or Final Fight or even better, the great TURTLES IN TIME (all hail to TMNT) on the SNES. Those were just awesome, stupid and fun. Good times.

[3]

Oh and fighting games! They are all bad beyond description, if you ask me. Because they just make no fucking sense!

Care to elaborate?

[Puck]

The first thing that comes to mind is the walker AI when it comes to singleplayer.
The second thing is this timing thing, dont know how to best describe it, since I'm in a hurry... most fighting games have ... "cancelling moves" that dont make any real sense, like how you could pluck people out of the air in Street Fighter 2, for instance. If you did some of those moves in RL, you'll just break yourself (I know, thats true for 90% of the stuff happening in those games, but bear with me a little longer), instead of intercepting that 200 pound monster, which comes at you, flying, screaming. And as far as I can tell, a LOT of games still do that. Makes me cringe.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not crying for realism, just a little bit of... consistency.

I always thought toribash made the most sense, I can play that a bit, but it sure as hell isnt that much of a party game, compared to your average beat em up. But yeah. At least it TRIES to actually simulate kinetic energy.

edit: maybe if i put it like this... imho a fighting game should be high speed rock paper scissors. while most are high speed rock rock rock, and the real deciding factor is timing. Or to put it yet another way: more often than not the proper cancelling move doesnt really match the move its supposed to cancel and just looks shitty and unbelievable.

[3]

I can agree with your point about most AIs (I love the great tradition of having an AI teleport on top of you the exact frame you input a fireball motion or something similar).

I don't think you're using the right terminology when it comes to what you call "cancelling". That really isn't what cancelling is, at all. But regardless. If you mean that Newton's Third Law doesn't show up all the time in games, then that's a necessary abstraction of traditional design. I won't bother to go into the specifics of it unless someone asks.

Consistency? There is consistency within development teams. Different series will have significantly different mechanics, sure, but if you play fighting games that mainly come from a small selection of companies you'll appreciate that there is consistency between games, and there's a lot of nigh-universal consistency regardless.

Response to edit: Fighting games are complex rock-paper-scissors incarnate. The mechanics of good fighting games are so incredibly subtle that it's amazing that even the slightest semblance of balance is evident in them - there's so much to consider. It's probably a little longwinded for me to explain, but if you've not had a great deal of experience with them, then it's likely going to be very hard to appreciate the mechanics properly.